Samuel Bowater viewed South Carolina as the hub of all that was civilized and proper in America. When he thought of the Yankees coming, of the low, dirty mechanics and foreign-born plug-uglies, the dried-up abolitionists in their black clothing, the fast-talking, haughty New Yorkers running unchecked through his beloved Charleston, lording over his fellow Southrons, it made him angry in a way that surprised him.
They were the unwashed, battering down the gate to his shining city, the Persians coming to topple his perfect Athens. It was silly, of course. He knew plenty of Yankees, had been shipmates with them, and they were fine men. But somehow those men with whom he had sailed were not the same as the infidels who were coming to destroy his cherished South Carolina.
“No,” William Bowater said, “I should think it is not an easy thing at all. For thoughtful men it cannot be an easy decision,” and for the first time Samuel believed he heard a note of approval in his father’s voice. “Will you apply to the navy?”
“The navy is all I know. But there are plenty of naval officers who have not been sitting on the fence, and I fear the available berths have gone to them. There can’t be but a dozen or so ships in the whole Confederate Navy.”
Samuel was being generous, and he knew it, referring to the ragtag collection of tugs and paddle wheelers and sundry craft as “ships.” If there was no navy, he did not know what he would do. Join the army, perhaps, but what good could he be to an army?
“Perhaps it is too late, perhaps not,” William Bowater said. “I think your action in the Mexican War has not been forgotten.”
Samuel tried to wave the comment away. A stupid, rash move, a burst of youthful enthusiasm, more than a dozen years ago. By some miracle he managed to rescue a few dozen sailors when by all rights they should have been dead, along with himself and his crew. It had been a foolish act, but since he lived it was viewed as heroism.
“What is more,” William added, “Stephen Mallory and I are acquaintances, I might venture to say friends.”
“I had no idea,” said Samuel. Stephen Mallory was a former senator from Florida, former chairman of the United States Senate’s Committee on Naval Affairs, and, as of February, Secretary of the Navy of the Confederate States.
“We had occasion to work together on a matter concerning a merchantman belonging to a client of mine wrecked on Key West,” William said. “We only met twice, but have kept up our correspondence, even to this day. If you like I will write you a letter of introduction.”
“Yes, if you think it proper.”
“I will do no more than attest to your character. The rest is between you and Mallory.”
“I would expect no more.” Samuel felt his mood buoyed by the promise of action. Not combat-he was a long way from that-but something, anything beyond the purgatory of indecision to which he had condemned himself.
After more than a decade in the United States Navy, where action and promotion were equally unlikely, where discipline and protocol were maintained out of habit and not out of any pressing need, the idea of an upstart navy was refreshing. Better to play at David, with blood pumping in his veins, than be a sleepwalking Goliath. He was eager to be at it.
“I will leave tomorrow for Montgomery,” Samuel announced, even as he reached the decision himself. “Isaac, fetch Jacob.”
Jacob stepped into the room. He was the son of Isaac and Isabella, the Bowaters’ cook, had been Samuel’s servant for the past seventeen years, since Samuel had turned sixteen. Aboard the
“Jacob, I’ll be off to Montgomery in the morning. Pray pack my bag. I imagine I shall be away a week or so.”
“Yes, Misser Samuel. I’s goin’ with you?”
“No, I think not.”
“Yessuh,” he said and was gone.
“Dear Lord, but I am famished!” Samuel announced. “Is dinner not yet served?” He had not felt so sharp an appetite for months.
3
– Private George Gibbs, 18th Mississippi Infantry
The late-afternoon light was muted and soft and the breeze had died away and the warm ground gave off its smell of early spring. The Yazoo River moved slowly down to its rendezvous with the Mississippi, where together they would flow to the sea. But all of the earth’s somnambulant pace could not smother the excitement that rang through the halls and fields of Paine Plantation.
Robley Paine, owner of the plantation, patriarch of the family, stood on the wide porch, under the roof painted light blue on the underside to mimic the summer sky. One hand on the brilliant white porch rail, he stared out at the vast green lawn which rolled down to the Yazoo River, the grass as smooth and flat as the water, with only the one old oak to break the straight run from porch to river.
Paine Plantation, all nine hundred acres of it, was just south of Drumgould’s Bluff, on one of the rare straight stretches of the twisty Yazoo. From northeast to southwest the river ran like a great corridor though the green, fertile country of western Mississippi, past countless fields of cotton, cotton, cotton, the currency of the South.
Cotton was to the Southern man what the buffalo was to the Plains Indian, and Robley figured that if cotton could migrate, then the Southerners would pick up and follow after it.
A shout from inside the house, and Robley was pulled from his thoughts by the commanding voice of his oldest boy, Robley Paine, Jr., ordering, “You give me back that gun, now!”
Robley Junior was a venerable twenty-two and took his leadership and manhood seriously.
“Yassa, General, suh!” the higher-pitched voice of Jonathan Paine, third and youngest son, eighteen years old. Paine smiled and shook his head. How ever would those three boys manage under the real discipline of army life? They had lived their wild, rambunctious, and carefree youths there on that plantation, on the banks of that river. They had grown to manhood under Robley’s eye, Robley’s none-to-firm hand.
He would not crush the joy from them, as his father had done to him, just for the sake of making them strong. Robley was strong, and he reckoned he would have been strong even without the sermons, the beatings. Stronger, most likely. He probably would not have the brittle feeling inside him, as if his soul was a skim of ice on a water trough in early winter.
Robley Paine had let his boys run their heedless way, let them suck the joy out of every moment of their youth. Despite the disapproval of his fellow planters, all the head-shaking and tongue-clicking over the subject of his easy parenting, he gave them little by way of discipline. Just his quiet instruction and his love, and that he gave unstintingly.
And for all the predictions of worthlessness and profligacy, his boys, Robley, Nathaniel, and Jonathan, had grown to fine and honorable young men.
Robley Paine, Jr., was talking again, in his officer’s voice. “Git your goddamn gear on, and be quick about it!”
He was now, informally, Lieutenant Robley Paine, Mississippi Infantry. The young men of Mississippi were responding to their state’s call to arms. From Ocean Springs and Amite and Covington and Pike, from Marshall County and Carrol County and Clark County and from Yazoo, from every town and county in the state, young men were becoming young soldiers.
